From Munich to Munich

How Germany chooses to remember its past has always been crucial to Europe’s future.

The news from last weekend’s annual Security Conference is that Angela Merkel has flatly refused Kiev’s pleas to supply it with defensive arms in the face of Russia’s onslaught in eastern Ukraine. “I cannot envisage any situation in which an improved equipment of the Ukrainian army leads to a situation where President Putin is so impressed that he will lose militarily,” the German chancellor bluntly told an audience of high-level dignitaries.